Beyond the Pole by A. Hyatt Verrell (first published in two pats in Amazing Stories, October and November 1926; reprinted in The Gernback Awards 1926: Volume 1edited by Forrest j. Ackerman; available online at Roy Glashan's Library, at Faded Page, and at https://stillwoods.blogspot.com/2010/01/ahverrill-his-story-so-far.html, which provides links to all of Verrill's science fiction, as well as many of his other works, fiction and nonfiction)
Beyond the Pole is a lost race tale, taking place in 1917. The narrator, a sailor from an ill-fated voyage to the far southern reaches in search of sea-elephant oil to aid the war effort, finds himself apparently the sole survivor, after a series of violent storms that had wrecked his ship and stranded at the South Pole. This South Pole is not a frozen wasteland though. It is a land where he encounters a forty-foot long lizard and giant rodents. He roams a land of blue light, desperate for food and water. finally finding water, he slakes his thirst, then, exhausted, he collapses.
He wakens to find a strange and horrifying creature towering over him:
"Slowly I opened my eyes and as I did so I screamed aloud with terror and wonder. Standing over me was a fearsome, terrible creature. That he was not a man I knew at my first glance, and yet, there was something that resembled a man about him, but so terribly monstrous, weird and incredible, so utterly inhuman, that I felt sure I must be dreaming or out of my senses. He or it was fully eight feet in height, standing on two legs like a man, and seemingly clad from head to foot in some soft, downy material that glistened with a thousand colors, like the throat of a humming bird or the tints on a soap bubble. Above the shoulders was a large, elongated, pointed head with a wide mouth and a long pointed snout. From the forehead projected long stalks or horns and on the tip of each of these was an unwinking, gleaming eye like the eyes of a crab. In place of eyebrows, two long, slender, jointed, fleshy tentacles drooped down over the creature's shoulders, while the ears were long, soft, and pendulous like those of a hound. There was no hair upon the head, but instead, a number of brilliant, shiny scales or plates, lapping one over the other from the forehead to the nape of the neck."
The creature had three pairs of long, many-jointed arms, ending in a number of delicate various-shaped appendages. Its feet had round-tipped suckers like those on the tentacles of an octopus. In essence, the creature resemble some odd sort of gigantic crustacean, and it made strange, unintelligible sounds as if it were trying to communicate. **
It offered a sort of biscuit to our narrator. He tasted it and immediately felt his hunger and thirst going away. Realizing the creature was friendly and meant him no harm, he then followed the creature some distance to a giant cylinder, where he was greet by two similar creatures. The cylinder was some sort of vessel but appeared to have no mechanical means of propulsion. Nonetheless, it ascended into the air very rapidly and soon brought them a large and very strange city, where he was escorted to a gigantic hall where there were many other creatures, presumably there to sit in judgement of him. Still, he had no fear, in part from the way he was treated in the beginning, and in part because he could not be sure that the entire experience was not a fever dream, brought on by extreme hunger and thirst.
He was amazed, however, to discover that the creatures could communicate with him through some sort of telepathy, and that he likewise could communicate with them. Here was a race well advanced from mankind scientifically, and perhaps socially, descended from some alternate evolutionary oath which stemmed from crustaceans. Yet despite its advanced science and flight, it had no knowledge of anything beyond its own world, or of the human race.
As the novel progresses, our narrator learns much about the culture of this race, and seems fated to spend the rest of his life with them. He does, however, write his experiences down on a strange type of "paper," and seals it in a type of container unknown to the outer world; this he attached to the leg of an albatross, hoping it will eventually find its way to the world of men.
** This critter is illustrated by Frank Paul on the iconic cover of the October 1926 issue of Amazing Stories.
Verrill (1871-1954) was a zoologist (his father was the first professor of Zoology at Yale University), explorer, illustrator and author of at least 115 books, most of them nonfiction about topics ranging from natural history, travel, radio, whaling, engines, and knot tying. Outside of science fiction, many of his fictional books were aimed at a juvenile market, including four books in the Boy Adventurers series and four books in the Radio Detectives series, as well as the Deep Sea Hunters series. His books for younger readers were entertaining but criticized for "outrageous fabrications," :lack of scientific dependability," and riddled with error; any other critics and reviewers reacted in an entirely positive manner. As for his science fiction, Everett Bleiler wrote that his lost race stories were "more literate than most of their competition, but stodgy."
Verrill took part in archaeological expeditions in the West Indies and Central and South America. He was well travelled throughout the Western hemisphere, and was a friend to Theodore Roosevelt. Among his other accomplishments was the invention of the autochrome process of natural-color photography. His wide range of interests made him "one of the most successful and prolific writers" of his time.
No comments:
Post a Comment